Brazilian abroad. Product Designer, moving to Design Ops. Focused on design systems and scaling products and teams.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Joined February 2009
- Tweets242K
- Following1.8K
- Followers861
- Likes5.9K
Eduardo Tello retweeted
The story of tech and design:
In 1976, Apple figured out that design, taste, and quality make better products.
Ever since, everyone in tech has wanted to be like Apple and “do design,” while remaining completely oblivious to what design, quality and taste actually means
“designing much faster than the others” — this so daft and makes it clear they don’t understand design at all. “Designing fast” (or slow) is just not a thing. If you conflate “producing ui by piecing together stuff” and “design” then the former (which is a form of assembly-line practice) can surely be fast or slow.
What makes the practice of design challenging is not how to put a ui or poster together, it’s what the pieces are, what the message is, what is being communicated, how it all works together.
So many of today’s “design” AI tools focus almost exclusively on the production part, on putting stuff together. I’d love to see an AI design tool that forms a deep understanding of a problem over the course of days or months and works like a creative partner. Call me on my bullshit, thinks about the whole, isn’t concerned really about the final arrangement of elements as much as it would understand the story and the message.
Eduardo Tello retweeted
I still have non-Brazilian friends who think São Paulo is fine to visit
We hired a great Uber driver to drive us to Florianopolis, like a 3 hour trip, cause was easier than flying then, very nice guy
While driving I sat in the back talking a bit with him and practicing my Portuguese
Then I noticed he didn't wear a seatbelt so I asked why
He said "so I can draw my gun quickly"
I said "desculpa the fuck what gun"
Then he showed he was wearing a holster on his right side with a gun it which he carried for safety because he said drive into and out of São Paulo often
So being a funny naive Dutch guy I asked "so did you ever kill someone?"
He said "yes I killed a guy last year who came at me and who tried steal my car in São Paulo"
And then he told me he was in a judicial trial about it and being prosecuted for it
I asked him again in the naive Dutch guy perspective "did you get like therapy after? like must be intense right, do you feel bad about that?
He said "no why? If I didn't kill him he would have killed me" ☠️
Foreigners especially Europeans have no clue how violent São Paulo and Rio are, it's just not in their mental framework to be able to understand the danger, Brazilians themselves are surprisingly honest and realistic about it
There a reason I stay the F out of São Paulo
I mpstly stick to South Brazil, it's safe, not as safe as Europe but mostly very safe and not really violent. The violence and crime there seems mostly isolated between gangs and in the few favelas there
About that too I asked Brazilians "why is South Brazil so safe?"
And they mostly agreed when a guy told me "because the police here shoot to kill" while in São Paulo and Rio the police is too scared to get prosecuted for killing people
如果你去南美第一大城市巴西圣保罗出差，抬头会看到全世界最魔幻的阶层隔离奇观
城市上空注册着超过 400 多架私人直升机，市中心两百多栋写字楼和豪宅顶层全焊着停机坪，每天有上千架次直升机像出租车一样在天上嗡嗡穿梭！
圣保罗的亿万富豪和跨国高管为什么宁可花几千美金包机飞 15 分钟去上班，也不肯坐劳斯莱斯走地面道路呢？
这是因为地面交通不仅堵成死水，更因为贫民窟与富人区犬牙交错。在地面红绿灯前一旦被堵死的话，骑摩托车的持枪劫匪可能会随时冲上来敲碎车窗抢劫甚至绑架！
这直接把巴西逼成了全球第一大民用防弹汽车（Blindados）市场，全国有超过 30 万辆私家车把车门和玻璃全改造成了能挡住 9 毫米手枪和左轮子弹的防弹装甲壳。
这可真是顶层在天上飞，中产在防弹铁壳里躲，底层在街角抢，拉美式折叠其实比科幻片还真实🌚
Eduardo Tello retweeted
Great question. My rough framing is that AI has given engineering a 100x boost, product 10x, and design 5x. That imbalance creates real strain: engineers can merge lots of individual changes while the overall UX gets less coherent, and designers burn out trying to keep up.
Design is a deep craft. It takes thought and a view of the whole experience. We haven’t given designers tooling that matches how quickly we can now produce code.
That’s why we’re building Inspect for designers. The ambition is to give them the 200x boost. Then engineers can be the ones trying to keep up :)
Eduardo Tello retweeted
True poverty is being superrich but having to drive a car with bulletproof glass
Eduardo Tello retweeted
BREAKING: Volkswagen announces a European rival to Tesla’s “flying” Roadster
Some insane confirmed features:
1. Top speed limited to 110 km/h
2. Automatically reports speeding to authorities
3. Automatically turns off the AC if outside temperature is below 35°C
4. Car will not start when public transport option exists on your route
5. Built-in system reminds you how much CO₂ your trip produced
Launch expected after EU regulatory approval in 2068
It is truly completely over for Tesla
Eduardo Tello retweeted
As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:
1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship
2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales
Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.
A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:
- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3
- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5
- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2
Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?
Eduardo Tello retweeted
NEW from Datadog: it's Lapdog!
Ever wondered what your AI agent was actually doing?
Our latest free project runs locally and traces reasoning and tool calls in Codex, Claude Code, and Pi.
You can now see what your agent is REALLY doing, live: lapdog.datadoghq.com/
Eduardo Tello retweeted
The succession everyone called for years just happened, and it's the most revealing personnel decision in tech this year. Apple is the company most behind in AI: Siri delayed three times, Apple Intelligence launched with hallucinated news headlines, and the upgraded assistant is reportedly going to be powered by Google Gemini under the hood. The obvious move was to put a software or AI executive in the CEO seat. Instead the board picked the guy who runs hardware engineering.
Ternus has been at Apple 25 years. He's a mechanical engineer. He's never run software, services, or AI. His resume is iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and the M-series silicon transition. He is the silicon-and-systems candidate.
Cook leaves with the receipts. Market cap from $350B to $4T, a 10x in 14 years. Revenue from $108B to $416B, nearly quadrupled. Services from a footnote to a $100B business. He inherited a hardware company and built a recurring-revenue platform on top of it. The market said thanks by selling AAPL down 1% after hours.
The Ternus pick tells you what Apple's board actually believes about the next decade. The AI race won't be won at the model layer where Apple is hopeless and renting from Google. It'll be won at the silicon layer (on-device inference, custom NPUs, thermal envelope, battery), the form factor layer (glasses, wearables, ambient computing), and the integration layer (the chip talking to the OS talking to the model). All hardware-adjacent problems. All Ternus problems.
The bear case is straightforward. Apple just promoted the executive least connected to the technology that's eating the world, at the exact moment software-native companies (OpenAI with Jony Ive's device, Meta with Ray-Ban, Google with Gemini-everything) are coming for the iPhone's distribution. A mechanical engineer running the most valuable consumer software platform in history. That's a real bet.
The bull case is the same fact framed differently. Every competitor is converging on the realization that AI hardware (the device the model lives on) is the next platform, and Apple has spent 25 years building exactly that. Ternus shipped Apple Silicon, the only credible non-Nvidia AI chip in a consumer device. He runs Vision Pro. He inherited the robotics team in the April reorg.
The boring read is succession planned years in advance, no surprise. The interesting read is that Apple just told you it doesn't think the AI race ends with the best chatbot. It thinks it ends with the best device. And it picked the person who builds devices.
Eduardo Tello retweeted
Designers suddenly feel the need to explain that «design is more than just outputs». That itself is a bad sign.
Unfortunately, designers cooked it themselves.
Designers had a problem I called Figmaism – an obsession with tools and visuals at the expense of other (and more important) skills.
We knew hard skills are only a fraction of designers’ competencies. But we still kept talking mostly about new Figma features and pretty visuals to impress other designers (instead of customers).
One reason is a defence mechanism - it's easier to hang out in Figma than to face KPIs, OKRs, and roadmaps (AKA the things that actually matter).
Designers shouldn’t be surprised that design is being reduced to output because they helped create that reduction.
So if designers failed to make the case when the profession had more leverage, I’m not sure why we expect others to buy it now.
Eduardo Tello retweeted
After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't:
Having a full-time designer in the room at all times
I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll.
This makes product development broken:
1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time
2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work
3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like
And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution.
There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team.
At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.
Eduardo Tello retweeted
I keep thinking I miss having someone like Steve Jobs in the industry.
He had some standards. He cared about quality, coherence, and making great products. He could be ruthless and he had plenty of flaws, but it still felt like he and Apple were trying to make something genuinely great above all else. They had their opinions and you could respect that. They didn't try to force you, but make their case why they think it's good.
Now tech feels driven by trend chasing, fear, scale, revenue comparisons, endless games and everyone talks their book. Investors come first, business goals next, and users last if not at all.
I wish there would still someone like Steve still around
